The Winter Spirits Quotes

“There, surrounding me, were volumes and volumes of words that black-hearted men had scratched down, silencing woman after woman. I thought of the city, filled with smoke and screaming; I thought of my grandmother, adding pine branches to the pyre so the smoke might kill the women before the flames; I thought of the laws and the hunts that this man – fingers linked across his belly, his portrait shining behind him – would bring back if he could.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“For one night, once a year, he could feel properly punished for those cities he’d set alight.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“The living must look out for the dead or how else can there be a haunting?”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“Ahead, framed by the light from an open doorway, stands a grave and lovely angel. ‘Are you dead?’ the angel asks. ‘I don’t know,’ replies Ada.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“The old woman was right. I wasn’t a good father, but I could, at least, try to be a better man.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“You don’t need to be redeemed. You weren’t an evil parent, just a poor one. It’s a hard job, and it doesn’t suit everybody. There’ll be plenty worse who don’t end up here. Sometimes, bad luck finds you because you’re standing in its way.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath, trying to right myself. Desperation was quicksand. If you gave yourself to it, it would swallow you completely.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“His voice – when it came – was small, and stinging. ‘I hate you.’ ‘That is the natural state of all fathers and sons,’ I replied coldly, from behind my newspaper. ‘You’ll grow used to it in time.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“A man needs fear to get ahead in this world. He must understand the gravity of poverty, which is always trying to pull him down. My own father taught me that. He never taught me anything else, so must have reckoned this one lesson sufficient.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“A man needs fear to get ahead in this world. He must understand the gravity of poverty, which is always trying to pull him down.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“As I raced along the shore, stumbling on loose stones, I thought what it was to humiliate a man, to have him fear he might lose his standing in this world. A Lord Justice Clerk in red velvet, setting the law, meting out his punishment.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“A gun, once discharged, cannot have the bullet packed in.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“I saw how whispers spread, and I knew it was he who was spreading them. What a thing it was to have a circle of powerful male friends, to carry influence.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“Sometimes I would touch my throat just to hear the vibration of my voice, to know that it still made a sound. I began to feel like a ghost, like a thing unseen slipping between the walls.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“A person did not decide to live on a rock tower in a gannet colony if they enjoyed other human beings.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“Ezekiel had seen angels, which seemed like promising sermon material until you heard how he described them. Each one had four faces – a person, a lion, an ox, an eagle – and six wings; and there were topaz wheels with them, rimmed with eyes.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“Flint wouldn’t laugh. He would not. You couldn’t go around laughing at natural Timothies for being accidentally called Bruce.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“Consider your station,’ she went on. ‘Consider your good fortune.’ I would have protested then, and opened my mouth, but she cut me off: ‘Your good fortune compared to those around you. You’ve fallen on hard times – I cannot imagine your distress – and so I forgive you a great deal. But never let me see you mock someone less fortunate than you.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“Jasper didn’t like this nasty little story and he was sorry he’d asked. ‘All this happened in my room? It’s a good thing I don’t believe in ghosts.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“They are lucky to be together: this is repeated on the Island, where it is common to have breaks in the limbs of your family tree, oozing tender sap.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“The lady had been in the painstaking process of drawing her own postcards; she had done beautiful sketches of the cliffs, the ruined village, the gannets. On one, there was a figure with antlers standing up on the clifftop. He paused over that, because it looked just like what he’d seen through his camera, but he still couldn’t think what it could be. The bishop would say it was the Brocken spectre of a rearing stag, or something else nerve-blastingly ordinary.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights

“So,’ Flint said. ‘What do you think happened to the people who disappeared?’ ‘The original islanders, or the two lately?’ Kerryn asked. ‘The two lately.’ ‘Same as whatever happened to the originals, for my money,’ he said seriously. ‘Perhaps they were Taken.’ He nodded upward. Flint did believe that things like that could happen, but he also believed that a) the Almighty had invented physics for a reason, and b) the Almighty had forgotten about the United Kingdom.”
― Bridget Collins, The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights